MONTREAL - When the termination letter came from the company in early June, Montreal factory worker Shelton Bernard was surprised, then stunned, then insulted, then angry.

He and the other 130 unionized employees at Old Dutch Foods in Lachine will be paid full salary until the 50-year-old plant shuts permanently in late September.

But as severance, all they will get is a small lump sum.

One week’s pay, no matter how long they’ve worked at the factory — that’s it. For the lowest on the pay scale, it amounts to barely $740 before deductions. For the best-paid, $1,000.

“Imagine — they want to pay us nothing!” said Bernard, a machine operator who has worked at the Norman St. snack food plant, formerly the Humpty Dumpty potato chips factory, for 10 years.

“It’s insulting,” added Rohan Williams, a sanitation worker at the factory, who, like many of the others being laid off there, clears about $520 a week after tax.

“People who’ve been here 30 years or more will get exactly the same thing, 40 hours’ pay, right across the board,” said Williams, an 11-year veteran on the overnight shift.

“Some of them have been here since they were teenagers. They practically built the company. They’ve dedicated their lives to it — complete families, in some cases.”

The injustice makes his blood boil.

“Maybe from a legal standpoint the company can pull it off. But come on! From a moral and a human standpoint, they shouldn’t be able to get away with it.”

But they just might. And so will many others.

The rude fall off the Humpty Dumpty paywall is not unique to Old Dutch. Across Montreal and in other parts of Quebec, workers at old-style industries are hurting.

In mid-July, the first 200 of 1,300 workers at the Swedish-owned Electrolux cooking appliances plant slated for closing in L’Assomption will be thrown out of work.

Next spring, the Mexican-owned Mabe Canada dryer factory in east-end Montreal will close, leaving several hundred more without jobs.

And in another example, in Châteauguay and Quebec City, 150 workers at Original Foods will be unemployed when the company moves to Ontario.

Because traditional manufacturing jobs tend to keep workers for many years, the toll on lives — touching entire families through several generations — is enormous, experts say.

And often, there’s very little a union can do to ease the pain.

“If the factory closes and there’s nothing in the collective agreement about severance, there’s nothing they can do,” said Montreal labour lawyer François Longpré.

“Actually, if you’re not unionized, you’re in a better position to get a package,” added Longpré, a partner at Borden Ladner Gervais who also lectures at McGill University.

The Quebec Labour Code stipulates that when a company closes, employees must be given sufficient notice of termination: up to eight weeks’ notice for the most senior (over 10 years on the job). That means the people whose jobs are disappearing can collect their salary for two months before the layoff happens. After that, it’s up to the employer to decide on severance, if any.

If there’s no union contract, the default law is Quebec’s Civil Code. It requires companies to award employees a severance package that’s “reasonable” under the circumstances. That’s decided on the basis of three criteria: the employee’s age, position in the company and years of service. The higher those are, the higher the indemnity.

“The secretary, the receptionist, the foreman, the director of the factory — they’re the ones likely to get packages,” said Longpré, noting that Old Dutch, for instance, has more than 35 non-union staff on its payroll. “How much they get is at the discretion of the company, but it can be much better than what the rank and file get.”

For unions, the trick to getting a good deal for their members is to negotiate it long in advance, so that it’s clearly spelled out in their collective agreement. That’s what happened, for example, in the case of Mabe, the factory in Hochelaga-Maisonneuve that makes General Electric and Moffat clothes dryers.

“We were advised years ahead of time what was coming,” recalled Michel Ouimet, Quebec executive vice-president of the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union of Canada. “So in the last round of negotiation, we improved protection of revenue for those people,” said Ouimet, whose union is affiliated with Quebec’s FTQ labour federation.

The writing was on the wall at Mabe as early as 2006, when the workers there gave up $25 million in pay and other concessions in exchange for a guarantee the factory would stay open at least until 2011, giving them a long lead time to find other work outside the company.

Low or zero severance pay is a global issue. In developing countries, industrial companies have run afoul of factory workers and union activists after their offers fell far short of expectations.

In Indonesia, Adidas only recently moved to settle a $1.8-million severance dispute at its PT Kizone sportswear factory, a full two years after laying off workers without compensation.

In Myanmar, negotiations last July at the shuttered Lin Htet wool factory resulted in 300 workers who wanted more severance pay getting a better deal: a sliding scale going up to five months’ pay.

In China, 500 employees at the Kai Da toy factory in the southern city of Dongguan rioted in 2008 after 80 migrant workers were laid off without adequate severance pay.

In Canada, too, some severance disputes have led to employee revolts.

After occupying their plant for three days in 2008, unionized workers at the Ledco tool-and-die factory in Kitchener, Ont., won the severance they’d been denied: $1,200 per year of service.

And at the bankrupt Collins & Aikman automotive interiors plant in Scarborough, Ont., 150 workers ended a two-day occupation in 2007 with a partial victory: $1.8 million of $4 million in owed severance.

Here in Quebec, disputes have taken on a political edge.

In the Electrolux closing, for example, the leader of provincial opposition party Coalition Avenir Québec deplored that “hundreds of families have been living in uncertainty for two years.

“Every day, women and men go to the factory not knowing what the future will bring them,” François Legault said last month after the government announced a stimulus plan for the region. The loss of 2,000 jobs, including subcontracted work and other jobs, “constitutes a social and economic drama for these families and the entire population,” Legault said, calling on Premier Pauline Marois to do more to help.

For its part, the government says it’s doing what it can.

It has backed the stimulus plan the Lanaudière regional council came up with in late April to mitigate the closing of the factory. It’s looking at finding a new use for the Electrolux building and spending $600,000 to bring new business to the region, including an industrial-design centre and biotechnology centre.

“I’m confident things will work out,” Véronique Hivon, the minister responsible for the region, said at a news conference in mid-May accompanied by the government’s finance minister, Nicolas Marceau.

There are many reasons why old-style factories close in Quebec: the decline in export value of locally produced products because of the strong Canadian dollar, for example. Another is the weakness of the American economy, as well as cheaper labour in the U.S. and Mexico and Quebec subsidies that don’t pan out.

That’s what happened at Old Dutch: no government cash.

The company, whose Canadian headquarters are in Winnipeg and its American head office in St. Paul, Minn., had asked Quebec for a subsidy of between $20 million and $25 million to upgrade the facility in Lachine, but Quebec refused. “Quebecers shouldn’t be asked to kick in such a large amount for an American firm that should, above all, show that it really wants to stay here and invest,” Elaine Zakaïb, the province’s industrial policy minister, said in early June.

The 130 unionized workers still employed at Old Dutch (70 others have already been let go) are holding out some hope they will get a better deal than just a week’s pay in severance — but not much. As the Sept. 27 closing looms, the signs are not good that they will get more than they have been offered now.

Their collective agreement, signed in 2009 and expiring at the end of this month, says nothing about severance pay. But the last time the factory closed — in 1969, when it made chips under the Maple Leaf brand — workers got one week’s pay for every year worked, and that’s what the union wants now.

It might be a toothless demand, however.

A meeting between the company and the FTQ-affiliated union was cancelled Thursday after the company barred the union’s negotiator from attending. The union is filing a complaint to Quebec’s Labour Relations Board, and will discuss the issue at a special general assembly of the Old Dutch workers Saturday.

Through its Quebec lawyer, the company declined to comment.

“They should be giving one week for every year of service,” said the negotiator, Sylvain Gagné, of the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers’ International Union.

“Maybe they’ll change their mind, but for now it doesn’t look good.”

Whatever happens, in conflicts like these, experts say the severance solution always comes down to two things: not just the ability of a company to pay up, but its willingness to do so.

“It can turn out badly or it can turn out well,” said Longpré, the labour lawyer.

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